What we learned Carolina/Chicago

Cam Newton is a stud. WoW, he floats a few passes, but man you cannot bring him down, he's got great pocket pressence, great feet/agility/speed to make plays by sliding around in the pocket, or running.

Speaking of stud, Forte. Congrats on your first 200yrd game; Martz must have died a little inside to run 25 times and not throw it 60 to make up for it; and if you saw the end of the game, considering it was a win, he didn't look happy at all. Yes it was against the 25 ranked rush D, but he showed when there are holes, he can run through them, when he is not hit the moment he is handed the ball off, he can get positive yards. And that he is big enough to shed tackles and fast enough to break off big gains and make people miss.
Our O: Forte's our Offense boys, get used to it. While the rest of the O struggled, he didn't. Cutler looked more confident in that pocket today then he has since Atl. OL looked shakey at times in pass protection, but amazing in straight up man to man run blocking. Sanz is again showing he's an undrafted rookie right now, but man he has some solid routes and nice hands. If the idea that K Davis was a better blocker then Olsen; and just as much of a threat, we can end that here, he is neither. Both suck as blocking, and Olsen is a far better O option. Knox had a few nices catches, Roy had a nice catch then disapeared. Did anyone else hear the announcers point out that Cutler had to tell RW's where to line up? Thought he knew this playbook wtf?
Speaking of stud, Hester, congrats for showing yet again why you are going to go down as the greatest return man in the hestory of the game. Our St's won this game for us today, a TD and a blocked FG, and great field position. Thank you Mr. Toub you are a Master.
Our D...wow they looked miserable. they got pressure on Cam; and Cam didn't care. Their rb's gashed us like I cannot remember seeing a rb do since Pierre Thomas a few years ago in Dec; first time I remeber hearing about him. They couldn't tackle, cover or sack/hit the qb. Lovie's D did get a Int for a TD, thank you Mr Moore. But it cannot all be about TO's, we again bent and broke to a rookie qb. We actually tried to blitz, and aparently Carolina was fully expecting it. Our coaches. timeout managment is atrousious in this game, they should be embarassed. I like that we tried to dial up pressure on the young qb, but we couldn't get there and he beat us up b/c of it.

Their O, man they looked like all world out there. Outside the one pick, and a few floaters, he looks like the real deal. That rb duo is scary awesome, those TE's...man could you just imagine and hope that we might have a few big body pass catchers to help our qb someday? Steve Smith is a stud. Those guys made our wr's look like pop warner; they took hits and held onto the ball. We can only hope to have guys like that someday.
Their D, man their run D is bad; for as good as Forte looked, take it w/a grain of salt b/c it was against this group. The rest of their D can deliver hits and tackle though.
Their Coaches, probably a bad choice to go 4th and 10 w/2 min's and 3 to's, but I can understand it. don't really care about the rest of the game.

I thought Klutts had some nice blocks. Louis coming in for Omiyale and did way better than Frank (which isn't saying much). It's going to be huge to get Harris back next week. Merriweather can lay some serious lumber, Wright missed some tackles on angles.

Can't count on ST like this next week. With luck and sticking to the run we may catch the Kitties at the right time.

And yes we should run it more with iso plays vs better teams and counters and sweeps vs lesser teams.

ya missed the Clutts. he did have some really nice blocks. Anything is better then Omifail.
We cannot win against Det next week playing D like we did today. Did you see the Kitties come back on Dallas? Megatron will not let a ball drop out of his hands in the endzone, and he's been thrown to in triple/quadruple teams and still catches it.
St's will not always look this good, but they will be big for us in the coming season. they have proven to be imaginative and can make things happen.

Nice review Ric. Yeah I'll bet Martz was surprised when they switched out his game calling card for one that only had running plays, LOL. That's one way to fix it. Actually we needed to pass more and control the clock a lot better but with OMG lined up outside on him Johnson would have eventually killed Cutler. Who in the hell ever thought that guy could pass block? It's inconceivable to me how they ever thought they could make a LT out of him. He can't even play RT.

I would agree with you about Davis' blocking. He just doens't set up right and he losed his man constantly. We ran the same play that Forte had his game ender on a little earlier and he got himself ass backwards to the line and let his guy take Forte down in the backfield. As a pass catcher though I don't see much difference between he and Olsen with the exception of the fact that you can flank Olsen out wide. Davis did nothing in the passing game today but then again who did? But that TD he had against GB last week showed me something about his athleticism and his power after the catch. If Martz will onlu use him we've got a very effective weapon since his tendency isn't to throw to the TE. Davis has scored TD's on 2 of his last three catches dating back to the championship game and as best I can recall three catches are all he's had in that time.

Congrats to Hester on the record breaker. He could have had a TD on that KOR had Conte gotten his ass downfield faster and took out Mare. Toub needs to have him look at that on film. It's like he was trying to match up his speed with Hester's and Hester just blew right by him. He has to learn that he just needs to go full bore and block and not worry about throwing the block too soon. At least he was smart enough not to block Mare in the back and cost us yardage. I'll give him that but I'd replay that non-block of his about a dozen times come Tuesday. You don't have to slow down and let Hester catch up.

For the most part the defense sucked but came up with the big stop when they had to. That's two weeks in a row that we've gotten gashed up the middle by a RB. DWill was 10/82yds and last week Grant was 17/92. That's 174 yds (6.4 ypc) right up the gut in two weeks. Sorry Brian but that's on you. Bad gap control in both games. You can't let them do that and pass you cross eyed and hold down the scoring. 27 points last week and 30 this one. Not gonna cut it. We need to be holding teams to 20 points max until we can get an offense that actually works and scores points.

What I learned is that we have even farther to go to beat the top teams than we did last year and that's not good. JA can take a bow for that so that all Bears fans can kick his ass for "not" doing all he could to better the offense. To whatever degree we fall back from last years results I will lay at his feet until he's either gotten himself fired of he does something about this pathetic offense.

Cam IS the real deal ... and we are lucky we got away with a win.

I wonder how many teams in the future will be able to make that statment?

Rivera has somthing to build around.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by short faced bear

I thought Klutts had some nice blocks. Louis coming in for Omiyale and did way better than Frank (which isn't saying much). It's going to be huge to get Harris back next week. Merriweather can lay some serious lumber, Wright missed some tackles on angles.

Can't count on ST like this next week. With luck and sticking to the run we may catch the Kitties at the right time.

And yes we should run it more with iso plays vs better teams and counters and sweeps vs lesser teams.

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Yes, I like having a true FB like Clutts back there. Great blocks on those TD runs. Sit OMG and play Louis at RT. He may not be all that better but at least he doesn't get shoved around and manhandled the way OMG does. He's pathetic. What did this guy ever do before he got here to make anyone think he was an NFL caliber player? I'm astonished.

Wright's play has gone south this year without Harris back there to hold his hand. Bad positioning and bad angles. Maybe we let Manning go one year too soon. Meriweather hits but Meriweather don't cover. Same issues he had at NE.

If Detroit lines CJ up against Jennings next week Jennings is gonna have to play on a step ladder to cover him. Between his ability to catch anything within the states borders and how poorly we're playing the run we may need to score 50 points next week to win. Sure as hell won't if we play like we did today.

What we learned...

Omiyale is the worst offensive linemen in the league
Tyler Clutts is a good FB
Marion Barber is a good back up RB
Forte is a beast

and Martz finally found the missing section of his playbook that had all his running plays.

It very much reminds me of 06, when after the SB they didn't have to do anything to improve "b/c we are close" Well ya except other teams have gone and done things to improve themselves, so staying still is actually taking a step back.

The OL is just bad, and I'm really scared about next week for Cutler and Forte, they are going to get crushed by Det's D. The D was bad, I'm not putting it all on Urlacher; where are the front 4 to shut those runs down? Where were the Will/SAM on some of those off tackle runs? Urlacher does get a good portion of the blame though; he didn't have a great game, you didn't hear his name getting called a lot. This D just cannot cover well enough to strictly rely on getting lucky and getting TO's each game. Lovie needs to do something to get real pressure on Matthews or it will be a long day next week. Cam/Smith is a sweet combo, Matthews/Megatron are other worldly though.

Chris Harris was missed on the field and I'm pretty sure he could of helped a lot with covering Smith.

I'll start with Martz. I think he was trying to prove something on those first two drives, and it backfired on him. I think he was trying to prove that we didn't have a run game. Bottom line is that we did. Although I seriously doubt that he's going to stick with it. We were ahead this entire game (after the first drive). When they got close, you notice that he started only running the ball on first down, and rarely on second or third.

Next, Mr. Martz. Get your GD play called before our O has to call a timeout. Not sure if all of these were on him or on Lovie to decide if we are going for it on 4th or punting/kicking a field goal, etc. Either way this needs to be hammered out. We can't be at the two minute warning with three blown timeouts due to bad coaching.

Offense:
Forte is a beast, what else needs to be said about him? I was also glad to see barber back, but he kind of disappeard for a while. I expected to see him on that third and 1 and also the 4th and inches.

Clutts (or however you spell it) is a beast of a blocker. That dude didn't miss a block all game that I saw. Love this pick up and the use of him at FB. Always like to see this dude lined up.

Oline. Had some nice runblocking today. I'm all for sitting Omigod and trying EWill at RT against the lions.

Cutler: Ric, I didn't see the relaxed Jay that you saw. If he got the ball off quickly, he looked good, but you could see him get nervous the longer he had to hold on to the ball.... all the way until he was in full panic mode. You could see his indecisiveness and anxiety. I didn't think he looked relaxed at all.

Defense: Well, we can't stop the run, we can't cover routes. Mediochre pressure from the dline, but a lot of that was Cam being a stud. That guy is hard to tackle, moves well in the pocket, and made some great effen passes. It's a good thing DJMoore is five yards behind the receiver every play so he can catch those tipped passes. That guy has been horrible all year and this was pure luck.

They only seem to step up in the redzone and when it's down to the wire. I don't credit them with all of those redzone stops though. Caroline broke down a few times and their mistakes cost them.

Special teams:
Won the game, hands down. Hester's kick return past midfield, hester's punt return for a td, and a blocked field goal. Yeah, that won't happen every game. Going into halftime, I was expecting the tides to turn. Our O wasn't producing, defense looked like a bunch of turnstyles and our O had put up a whopping 10 pts.

Summary:

We need Harris back badly. Martz had better keep running the ball so we can win games.

The lions game is going to be tough. If they play like they did today, they lose that game. Better step it up.